


you know you wouldn't want it any other way

by teddybearandlily



Category: Little Fires Everywhere (TV 2020)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25957060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teddybearandlily/pseuds/teddybearandlily
Summary: Izzy grows up.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	you know you wouldn't want it any other way

**Author's Note:**

> ’Why are all of the fics on AO3 for Little Fires Everywhere about Izzy? She’s not the focal point.’
> 
> I then wrote a whole fic from her perspective.
> 
> ~
> 
> I think as adults we can understand and empathise with our parents far more than as teenagers. That’s the case for me anyway and I’m not projecting in this story at all. At all.
> 
> ~
> 
> I disagreed at the suggestion/belief by some characters that children are innately and necessarily better growing up with ‘their’ race and some innate ‘culture’ as a result of this.
> 
> ~
> 
> This is a mix of both book and show canon.

> “The ideology of cultural nationalism is based explicitly on [a] singularising tendency and lends itself much too easily to parochialism, inverse racism and indigenist obscurantism, not to speak of the professional petty bourgeoisie’s penchant for representing its own cultural practices and aspirations, virtually by embodying them as so many emblems of a unified national culture.”

\- Aijaz Ahmad

_“Culture isn’t meant to be shared. Culture is about identity, community, family and tradition”_

French Vichy fascists agree:

> “… foundations for such an approach had been established at the turn of the century by Marshal Lyautey, who had first seen the wisdom of protectorates, which ensured that native societies would not become “uprooted” or “mongrelized”.
> 
> In a sense, then, Decoux [Vichy administrator] was not the first to showcase “cultural authenticity” and to contrast it to “mongrelization”.
> 
> The Vichy regime, then, marked the high-water Mark of reductionist, traditionalist, hierarchical, regional and rural vision of Indochina.”

\- Eric T Jennings

* * *

When you’re an adult, you have a million different ways to destroy yourself.

Cigarettes, fast food. A slow death or a quick one, speeding or driving drunk or wasting away. Drugs and alcohol. Sex that doesn’t mean anything and sex that means too much. 

Bar fights and forgetting the condom and giving a blowjob to your sort-of-friend in Central Park and getting arrested for fucking prostitution even though you wouldn’t take his money if it was a million fucking dollars. 

Not saying no when you should have and saying yes to things so perverse you feel shame years later. Knocking on the door of a house just like the one you grew up in, the blood still stinging on your cut open lip, crying in the cold air and saying you needed to use a phone. The man stepping back to let you, and stepping to the side so _he_ could rush in, hit the man over the head - you’d argued over how gently and he asked you if you wanted to be shot - and steal the two grand the man had hidden away in his sock drawer, the exact spot your father kept his emergency cash.

You want to ring your parents and tell them never to fall for such a trick, and it’s the first time in a long time that you feel comforted, instead of disgusted, by your mother. Like she would ever open to the door to a bleeding young woman in the middle of the night. Like she would ever step aside to let her use the phone. She’d just call the police. You’re both gutless and heartless and you are your mother’s daughter because you too feel you’re special enough to get away with it.

Yes, a million ways.

A failed marriage, an affair. Sleeping with married men who slapped you when you asked about their daughter, her photo tucked neatly into his wallet. Going back to him, the black eye not quite shined over.

Never calling your parents, even on Christmas, even when it’s been years, even when surely they’ve forgiven you, even when you’ve forgiven them.

A million ways.

A loaded gun.

A lie.

* 

But as children? You have no choice. No control about anything in your life, from where you grow up to when you eat dinner. 

I think that’s why babies cry. 

It’s not like they can talk to express themselves. They can’t make requests or demands. They’re helpless, wholly reliant on their parents. 

They can only scream.

When I was fourteen, I didn’t consider myself a child, but I think that’s what I did. Scream and scream and scream.

But when you’re a baby and you scream, warm arms pick you up to cuddle you close and hush you. They rock you and feed you and that’s all you wanted. That’s all you need.

Yes, even Mom did so. Now, when I am twenty-five and long since back, she laughs at a breakdown - that’s what she calls it - she had when I was a baby and she was overwhelmed with a fourth baby who never stopped screaming and a husband who was never home. 

I said sorry the first time, awkwardly, our new relationship still tentative, and she closed my hand with hers, warm and soft, and squeezed gently and told me I don’t have to say sorry for being born, Isabel, don’t be ridiculous!

I’m not sorry I was born into this family. She isn’t either.

I thought I knew everything when I was young. Isn’t it frightening, how much you don’t know when you’re fifteen and living in a warm and safe home?

What else could I do but scream, when I was fifteen or indeed during my whole childhood before that? I couldn’t move out. I couldn’t live somewhere else. Buy my own shoes. My own food. With what money, from what job? I couldn’t live the way I wanted to. 

Always, always, they told me what to do and what to say. Who to be. I had no control over my life. I wanted to start over, burn the whole palace to the ground.

I read in one of my childhood books, if you want to live where people are not afraid of mice, you must give up living in palaces.

So I did.

Someone told me once that sometimes, to start over, you needed to leave scorched earth behind.

So I did.

*

New York was big and gritty and just like it looked in the movies that I mostly knew it from. I had been in Pittsburgh too long, waiting for something that never turned up, and I felt out of place in that suburban neighbourhood, creepy almost, watching in their windows. It hadn’t been what I expected and almost immediately I could tell that I could wait forever outside the little house, fruitless, although I hung around for a few more days, not wanting to admit the inevitable.

So I thought I’d try my luck in New York. It was June by then, stifling in the heat. The subway was unbearable and mystifying. People didn’t stare but I imagined they did. Curious bursts of steam escaped randomly along the street and the fire escapes glinted in the haze. Honestly, from certain angles, it looked somewhat apocalyptic. 

Mom didn’t like New York, I never knew why, so the last time I went I was young. There was a Trip my last year of middle school but I wasn’t allowed to go because of something or other I did, I don’t even remember what now. Mom said I couldn't go and Dad backed her up, in that half-hearted yes honey way of his, and that was it.

I had been there, of course. Ballet at the Lincoln Center, fidgeting in my fancy white dress with a bow and my new shiny black patent leather pumps. They pinched my feet. Lexie’s pinched hers too but she didn’t whine and complain like a baby, like I did. 

Lexie was always the big girl. It makes sense, because she was four years older, but I never quite got that. She was so enthralled to be at the ballet. She skipped over the grimy sidewalk and dreamed of being a ballerina, twirling through the air. Mom enrolled her in classes when we returned. We all knew she could do it, if she wanted. Lexie was the kind of little girl you looked at and thought, she could be everything.

For Halloween one year, Lexie’s boyfriend Brian went as Clinton - the first black president, ha ha. Lexie went as the first female president (she and Mom had spent all of the previous Sunday cutting up white tissue paper into shards and didn’t even ask for my help although _I_ was the arty one).

And looking at them you did think - well. Maybe. Maybe they’d really do it.

So. I was fidgeting at the ballet and Mom nudged me. It was a ‘sit still Isabel, do you _realise_ how much your father and I spent on these tickets?’ kind of nudge. We had some special seats, a booth of our own.

No, I didn’t realise. Of course I didn’t realise. I was four.

Years later, Mom enrolled me in dance classes of my own, to improve my posture, just because she could and she had total control over my life, because it was something else on the list of things that proper young ladies in Shaker should do.

For my recital, I wrote on my forehead that I wasn’t their puppet.

They wanted me to be perfect. They didn’t think I already was, like Lexie. Or even Moody or Trip - I couldn’t skate by on being a boy and all the simple foolish mistakes boys make.

Mom could brag about it, her daughter, the brilliant flutist, playing with the Cleveland Youth Orchestra, spinning beautiful at her dance recital. She’d tell her friends at book club about it smugly.

They wanted to use me as a statement, but they didn’t get to pick the words.

New York was big. Big enough to lose myself in.

Literally.

*

When you’re fourteen and you scream, nobody hears you. Nobody answers. I was almost jealous of May Ling. She had _two_ mothers who loved her so much they would go to court to fight to keep her.

If someone wanted me to go with them, would Mom stop them? Probably. But only because of what the neighbours would say.

*

I lived in squats and walk-ups and in the basement of family homes with my boyfriend at the time. Abandoned buildings by the riverside. The streets, sometimes. I didn’t like shelters - they didn’t allow alcohol or drugs, and my life was so shitty I couldn’t cope without them. I had to self-medicate. I mean, my god, as I knew very well even lawyers had to take alcohol to cope sometimes. But it was okay in their own homes. 

Out on the streets? We didn’t have that luxury, that right to put what we wanted in our own bodies. I would have died if they forced me to go sober, I swear. I was only sixteen.

My good for nothing boyfriend asked me who to rob. I pointed, languid, at a schoolgirl. Knee socks pulled up to her thighs, walking home. The kind of girl who reminded me of who I used to be, if I squinted. The kind of girl I gave up being. The kind of girl I hated being. 

He didn’t ask questions. After, he tossed me her handbag, and I rifled through it, handed him the cash silently, tossed the wallet with her cards into a nearby grate where hopefully the police would find it, and kept the various knickknacks of a teenage schoolgirl. Lipgloss, cute Hello Kitty keychains, tissues. A banana, browning. A crumpled up Math test, B. Never quite good enough.

I got pregnant, I got an abortion. I thought of Lexie. 

I gave Pearl’s name, deliberate, defiant, and spent the next few months hoping Mia would come and scream at me, then fold me into her arms and forgive me, but no-one came.

I got pregnant, I kept him. When he was only two months old, I left him in my boyfriend’s small apartment while we went out to cruise, and the police broke in, and took him. A filthy, cold, hungry, grimy infant lying in wet blankets in a drawer. I had meant to buy a crib, but there was never any money and when there was I always found better things to spend it on. I told myself, tomorrow. 

I thought of her. What was her name? For some reason, when I thought of her, I thought of the word ‘baby’ only, but that wasn’t right, was it?

Somewhere, May Ling was having a better childhood than my son.

My boyfriend had warrants. Which I hadn’t known about but should I have been surprised?

I couldn't go to the police because I was too scared my parents would somehow find out, even though I was eighteen by then and surely they didn’t have a legal right to know where I was anymore.

Normal rules meant nothing in the face of my mother. She’d find out.

I didn’t even hesitate to think she was still looking. I just knew. She was a better mother than I was.

My boyfriend tried to tell me we were better off without my son, that he was better off too.

I dumped him but had to concede he was probably right. He left me with a parting gift of a black eye and he took all my money. I told myself I deserved it, that was the price for being an unfit mother. I was no sort of mother at all. I didn’t even go to the grocery shop and beg for milk, like she had. Even though he cried sometimes, the kind of mewl that I thought meant he was maybe hungry but I didn't have any more milk. 

I never knew why he was crying. Sometimes he just cried, even after being fed, and it sounded the same to me.

The two years after I lost him were the hardest. I was so traumatised, honestly, the memories come in flashes. I took so many drugs too. Most of it is black and I am grateful. 

Somehow, despite my best efforts, I didn’t die.

*

It’s true, when I was a kid, I didn’t know what I had. That’s not to say that my parents were right.

*

2002, when I was twenty, I went home. I realised I had thought of it as home all those years. There was no big break or realisation. I was just tired, and hungry, and sad. All of the time. Depressed, probably.

I went to the doctor when I felt so tired I could barely walk and he prescribed me more food. I burst into tears and he looked down at me, and he tried, he really did, but he couldn’t conceal the disgust, and all I wanted was him to be kind to me, to look at me like someone worth saving. 

To tell him who my mother was. To be a doctor’s daughter.

And I could.

So I went home.

I wanted to call Moody. But when a friend called our home and asked for Moody, they were told in a confused tone he wasn’t there, of course. He was already in Vietnam.

I called back the next morning and my father picked up. I can’t remember our conversation. It was short and I cried. He told me to sit there, not do anything, just sit tight and wait, and he’d be there that night. I didn’t know then, but he had a cross examination that day. The judge postponed it. Of course. The judge was a Shaker resident too. He knew all about me and my disappearance.

For the first time in a long time, I could rely on my father.

*

I was a clingy kid, can you believe it? I was the baby, the youngest. I hung onto Mom’s hand at the grocery store, while Lexie was the good girl and went to fetch items, while Trip raised hell and Moody got left behind. I felt safe with my hand in hers.

I was the youngest in a family of four and I don’t remember owning a single hand me down. Mom handed Lexie’s things to less privileged families and bought me everything new. That was a way for her to show her love, and I saw it as her just simply wanting to buy things.

*

Lexie’s in New York now. A lawyer. She acted in college but didn’t want to move to LA and wasn’t entirely sure about her childhood dream by graduation. She applied to law school on a whim - only Lexie - but decided it was best for her and I guess it was.

I had kept somewhat of an eye out on the film posters in New York. The new Julia Roberts. Well, why not? 

Dad’s proud. Mom too, although Lexie dodges talk of children at the dinner table when she’s home. I don’t get it, Mom being so upset at Lexie putting her career over children. Especially as Trip will have a boatload of children.

Brian’s still in Shaker. The first few months I was back, I was basically the local celebrity. People stared. Those who knew me, who went to school with me, served me ice-cream, and those who only knew me as the girl staring back at them in the missing photo that was plastered everywhere, and I mean everywhere, in Shaker. 

Sometimes I still see them fluttering about on lampposts on the streets of Cleveland Heights. Of course, they've long since been taken down in Shaker. 

Mom had even written an article in her paper describing my return. She had gone back to work full time when Moody went to college and within two years was assistant editor. Go figure. It ended ‘the family ask for your consideration and privacy’. 

It’s Shaker. Mostly, we got it.

It was a shock to see Brian and his wife at the bookstore. He smiled kindly, and looked me in the eye when he talked to me, and didn’t ask me any questions. I see them sometimes getting sundaes at Draeger’s. He waves me over, genial. He’s all smiles as he reminisces fondly about Lexie. As far as I know, they don’t talk.

‘My first love,’ he always says to his wife. I’m embarrassed and I always blanch.

‘Uh, schoolboy crush,’ I always retort, to reassure his wife. She laughs and seems genuine. He was always too laid back for Lexie.

I guess we’re friends.

I guess I get it. There’s nothing like your first love, schoolgirl crush or not.

Trip’s in Shaker too. He followed Lexie to Yale and followed Dad into his practice. Trip has the big house and the blonde wife and the 2.5 kids (well, the perfect three Mom actually wanted before I came along and I can say that without bitterness now), and I don’t know if he remembers _his_ schoolboy crush. If he ever thinks of them. I know Moody does.

I could ask Mom to find them, and she’d do it for me, but I don’t bother. I know who Mia was and I know she would be… disappointed to find out who I became. Not for what I did on the streets, but coming back. Running.

She was so kind, but it never seemed like enough.

When Mia ran away, she never went back. She survived. Through car wrecks and fevers, through menial jobs and women like my mother. She took care of her daughter the way I didn’t. The way Bebe didn’t.

Well, maybe not. I never knew what to expect from Mia. Maybe I’m just who Pearl became and of course she would still love her daughter. 

But then again, despite what I thought, despite what I wanted, I’m not her daughter. I’m my mother’s daughter.

I don’t have to ask Mom to know how Mia and Pearl are doing. They’re doing fine. I know this like I know Lexie loves her daughter with everything she has. Instinctive. 

They would land on their feet, Mia and Pearl. That’s just the kind of people they were. 

Unlike me, who at twenty-five still lives with her parents.

I’m not Mia’s daughter.

Moody’s in Vietnam. Drifting. Sitting on the beach writing songs on his guitar. Dad can’t talk to him without a disparaging remark. At his age he was on track for partnership at his firm. Mom sends him money and emails with him. He always asks about me but I’m not too good with email. I leave them sitting there for months, until too much time has gone by to reply to them. 

He looks happy, in the photos she shows me.

My poor parents. 50/50. Half of their kids have no idea what to do with their lives and no real likelihood of ever being totally independent.

Somehow, unbelievably, all Mom seems to care about is that we’re happy.

Well.

And alive, of course.

I sometimes try to tell myself, to make sense of my lost years, that this is my doing. That I left and came back and now everything is perfect. That I had to leave, do what I did, it wouldn't have happened otherwise.

it doesn’t quite work. My Dad said to his brother on the phone, once, that I don’t smile like I used to. That’s what I get for eavesdropping like a child but I was still stricken. 

Don’t I? I don’t smile much, that’s true, but is it really different and have I really changed so much. Of course I know the answer.

I would check, but most days I can’t look in the mirror because I never know what to expect and I don’t trust myself.

Sometimes, I still expect to see the gap toothed floppy haired little girl who stares at me from the walls, or the teenager I was when I left. 

Mom took the pictures from our grandparents as she packed up their house. Thank god for her compulsive photo taking and sending habits. Thank god we didn’t lose everything in my fire. On our mantelpiece, either side, there are large pictures of Lexie, Trip and Moody graduating. Mom still has up the picture of me from my missing photo and she doesn’t push me to have another one taken because she knows I hate having my photo taken. Honestly, I wish she would.

I have premature lines around my eyes and mouth. They’re not smile lines. My hair thinned after I barely ate for months and it’s never recovered. Mom suggests wigs or treatment, but gently, and doesn't argue when I refuse. Mom and Dad paid for me to get a set of fake teeth and that I accepted gratefully, but they’re too fake. Too white and shiny.

No, I don’t smile like I used to.

*

I went for a walk today and saw the unripe blackberries on the bushes beginning to bloom. So suddenly it came to me, those memories of being a child and going blackberry picking at the tail end of summer: hot days, skipping down narrow rural lanes, at my grandparent’s, with my long braid flying behind me, so vivid in my memory and so long gone now, staining my hands with the same friends every year. When we went home, my mother baked our harvest into sweet apple and blackberry pie. 

When did we stop? Everything bathed in that soft, golden glow, the haze of childhood. I was so happy then. I felt so safe. It was always different at my grandparent’s.

Everything seemed sunnier then, my memories dappled and blazing with light and sunshine. Was it really that much lighter and brighter when I was young, or is my mind playing tricks on me and betraying me again? The film of light. The lie of film.

My mother is going to die.

*

One time, one day, I decided to be nice to Mom. We were on a family trip, to Florida and the beac, I think. I smiled at her and politely asked her if she wanted some of my chocolate. I answered her questions without my normal tone, I didn't mumble, I forced down my instinctive frown and sarcasm. When she criticised me, I apologised and made a genuine attempt to rectify what I had done wrong.

It didn't fucking work.

She carried on snapping, and harping at me. No matter what I said, no matter what I did. She was just rude and mean, and eventually in the evening I lost my patience and snapped back and it felt real and right, and even good, and that was that. I stormed upstairs to be alone, slammed the door and laid down on the bed, upset but righteous. 

I thought it proved it wasn't me. It was her. There was nothing I could have done.

Time, too much of it, and space, solved everything. I think it would have anyway though. That my suffering in New York didn’t solve or resolve anything. If I had stayed, and gone away to college, we would have ended up where we are now. Or boarding school, maybe, probably Dad could have convinced Mom.

Yes. I wish I hadn't left.

*

I never told Mom about my baby. Out there somewhere, with some other parents. other grandparents. I couldn't imagine my parents as grandparents, somehow.

I told Dad.

He stared talking very fast, about how we could find him and petition, reclaim custody, how he knew some judges in New York socially, how of course they’d see it had been one unfortunate mistake and I had changed, how we could give a baby everything, I’d have help, he had a right to see his grandson.

I laughed at him. It was cruel but I couldn't help it. 

‘Are you fucking kidding me? After what you did for the McCulloughs?’ I said. Fuck.

He shifted uncomfortably.

‘He probably went to a family like us, Dad. Don’t worry.’

He wouldn’t be fighting Bebe Chow in court. This time, he would lose.

Jesus. Dad never mentioned him after that. I could see him looking at me sometimes, like he wanted to say something, but he never did. The looks stopped after Thomas Junior was born. Trip’s son. His first grandchild in every sense of the word.

I didn’t bother reaching out to his adoptive parents. I don’t even know if I could. I’m close to Linda now. I saw what she went through, the heartbreak, the loss.

I’m not saying there was any definitive right or wrong in the Mirabelle case, but it would be wrong for me to contact my son’s parents.

But yes. I still called him my son, although I did not think of myself as his mother anymore. I suppose that was the difference between me and Bebe. I have a whole family to love me. that I can love and take care of. she had nobody else. it’s been too long now. she is Bebe’s daughter.

I imagine him in Linda and Mark’s house, sometimes. With parents who love him. who could give him a better life than I could at nineteen. Maybe not as rich as my parents but don’t I know better than anyone that doesn’t necessarily equate to happy.

When I see him, he’s always the last age I saw him, nine months and pink and bouncing. He never grows old in my mind. I’ve forgotten his birthday.

Sure, if CPS had been more patient, or if I had fought more (because let’s be real, I was white and talked properly and they don't really want to separate babies from their parents) he could have had grandparents that dote on him and a future at Yale. 

But. Maybe he would have died when I was shooting up, before I came back. Got a fever when I was out of it and died, quietly slipping from the world.

Who the fuck knows?

I don’t, anymore.

Maybe May Ling would have died outside that fire station and none of this would have happened.

But she didn’t. And it did.

*

Cancer. Of course. Mom, who never smoked a single cigarette. 

Things didn’t go as perfectly as Mom wanted in her life but as usual, she got what she wanted in the end.

She chose her death.

No drugs, no treatment. This was after months of trials and medicine that made all her hair fall out, made her weak and woozy. Mom put a brave face on, as she always did, but I knew she was in pain.

Moody flew back from Vietnam and cared for her, Dad hired a nurse to relieve him. I barely had to lift a finger. I took a job filing in Dad’s office because running away is still my default option and Mom preferred it anyway, and he smiled at me, and told me it wasn’t too late to back to school. I told him I’d think about it and we talked like we used to, me a little girl with my legs dangling from the desk in his office.

Dad stopped smoking immediately, although Mom says it doesn’t matter, that lightning never strikes the same tree twice.

Trip has work, and he’s busier than ever, but Catherine brings the kids over a lot. Mom loves playing with them. 

Linda cooks and cleans and tells my Mom it’s no problem whatsoever. I see her in the kitchen a few times, leaning against the gleaming refrigerator, hand over her mouth, silently crying.

Of everyone, we never thought it would be Mom. Indefatigable. Tour de force. Hurricane of nature. She wasn’t superhuman, she was just the perfect human.

*

Mom and Dad tiptoed around me, when I came back. I babysat a lot for Mark and Linda. Their daughter Susan has a brother now. From the same orphanage and so they might really be siblings.

Their daughter’s middle name is Isabelle. A tribute to us both. Those lost daughters. I’m very close to Susie.

I’m glad, really, they’re all still close. Actually, I’m to blame for that. After I left, Mom and Linda bonded over the grief of losing a daughter. They both searched and searched. 

Mom never gave up. I’m not sure when Linda did.

We didn’t talk about it. The trackmarks on my arm. How I didn’t smile the same. Those five years, where I became an adult.

I realised some lies were preferable to the truth and some silences were akin to a lie.

I forgave my mother every day.

Like my father had. Like Lexie, Trip and Moody all had.

The way Mia never would, because she wasn’t family.

And she forgave me.

*

I’m on pills still. Depression, anxiety, whatever. Mom fills them for me. She makes my doctor’s appointments. If I moved out of Shaker, she couldn’t do that. Here, she’s known our doctor since she was five and he’s known us kids all our lives. So she makes my appointments.

Everyone makes exceptions for my Mom.

I always kind of thought the cancer would too.

Malignant? Untreatable? Terminal?

You don’t know my mother.

*

Lexie became a radical feminist at Yale. is it too cynical to say guilt was the main motivating factor? She designed signs for protests and cut her hair and called Bill Clinton a misogynistic pig.

To be fair to her, she became an escort at an abortion clinic and braved eggs and taunts to walk those poor women inside, and other more scary things that Mom couldn’t even talk about when she recounted the tale to me.

Mom beamed, and said what a brave young women Lexie was and talked about her own Mom and all the good she had done for the poor women of Shaker, black and white.

Even as a lawyer Lexie worked for Planned Parenthood, fighting never ending attempts to shut their services down.

‘We don’t only provide abortions, you know,’ she told me.

‘Does it matter?’ I replied. ‘Even if the only thing you did was provide abortion, that’s still a service that needs to be provided, doesn’t it?’

Lexie never quite made it to what she told herself she was, but who does?

Okay, what she did was important. Did she have to be so fucking smug? 

The truth is, even after I left and came back, if I did that, Mom would make far more pointed comments. But the sting I felt as Mom praised Lexie was faint and faded. 

Mom would turn to me when she was talking to her friends, ask me if I was okay, long after my hands stopped shaking, long after she needed to. She’d look at me like I was the only person in the room. The care in her eyes had always been there. She had always loved me and she tried to protect me the way she had been protected.

‘I’m so proud of Isabel,’ she said once, when I was coming back from the bathroom, softly, like she was telling her friends a secret. 

So she wasn’t ashamed of me. I lingered at the door, and it was even better somehow than if she had told me to my face, when I was in the room. I was eavesdropping and she was telling her friends how proud she was of me, instead of how ashamed, or just not mentioning me.

Mom said everything that mattered in whispers, in the shadows. I think her mother, despite the accolades and the achievements, never once told her she was proud of her to her face. That’s not how upstanding Shaker residents behave with their rebellious, runaway, drug-addict, disappointment of a daughter.

She never once pushed me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with, when I went home.

Lexie didn’t make as much as Dad, nowhere near, but that was okay, Mom said (slipping her money every month but who was I to protest - it struck me only Trip was truly independent and I wasn’t really surprised) because she could marry a husband who would take care of her. 

I could too. That’s why Dad didn’t mind mine or Lexie’s career (or lack of them) choices and why he bemoaned Moody’s, in Vietnam, from job to job, teaching english in jungle villages when he needed money and at the beach most of the other time. Poor Moody. What did they expect, with that name?

I rolled my eyes when Lexie came home and the things she said. Mostly I agreed but I liked to be contrary, still, always (Dad used to back me up and I felt a flush of pleasure at his approval even though I knew his agreeing to my protests to Lexie’s political correctness came from a much more nefarious place).

Sometimes I really did disagree with her though.

I mean, she told me once I couldn’t wear henna. Like, what the fuck? I was going to a wedding with my boyfriend at the time - his family wanted me to wear it. What harm did it do anyone?

‘Lexie, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you know you’re not Indian. Who are you to tell me I can’t wear henna? By your own fucking rules of this whole thing you’re not indian so you don’t get to talk about it, right?’

‘Well - ’

‘No! It’s not a thing. What Indian cares who uses henna? This probably all started with a white woman like you, with nothing better to do, who tells people what to do!’

I’ve changed a lot since I was 14 but tradition still means about as much to me as it did then. 

Cultures - societies too - that don’t change aren’t _authentic,_ they’re just dead. Deciding the custody of a baby - Dad still has the files - over a fucking fortune cookie is crazy.

I don’t know if the judge made the right decision - at a very distanced point, I can feel he maybe did realistically but not emotionally. Maybe. Honestly every decision he could have made was the wrong decision, and the right one - but if had have given May Belle to her mother, it shouldn’t have been for the attachment or lack of it to her ‘culture’. 

Culture is a lived experience and it can have closed specific _practices (_ which by the way, henna is not one of _)_ , but no culture is closed to ‘outsiders’.

Lexie would talk a lot about closed cultures and cultural appropriation and colonialism.

‘Lex,’ my boyfriend at the time said. He had just graduated from the local community college with a degree in history. Mom set him up with me, I don't know how she met him and to be frank, if she walked up to eligible looking bachelors in coffee shops and waved a picture of me in front of them, I I wouldn’t be surprised. 

To be honest, he was a bit like Brian. He’s in New York now and we have plans to meet up there, but it hasn’t happened yet. 

‘Lex, you know colonial authorities were super opposed to the mixing of cultures. Like, British people in India started to wear the local clothing early on and when the colonial authorities came in they banned it.’

I loved him, but the timing wasn’t right. 

She looked bewildered. Lexie is clever but she doesn’t really have what it takes to stand in a courtroom and argue. She gets flustered like Mom. But she’s a lawyer - she gave it a go.

“Well, they oppressed the local cultures. So…”

“So, you’re saying white people sought to erase my culture so it’s wrong for them to participate in it now instead of destroying it? That’s just a bizarre conclusion to draw.”

‘Are you saying cultural appropriation is a, is a good thing? It _killed_ your culture.’

‘I think cultural appropriation is an entirely _neutral_ phrase. It can be good, it can be bad. It’s case by case. But I think attempts to _stop_ it, like you telling Iz she can’t wear henna, are misguided if not actively harmful. It just is a total misunderstanding of what ‘culture’ actually is. And trying to preserve any culture is questionable. If you want to preserve a butterfly, you build a sanctuary, you don’t pin its dead body to the wall and what you’re saying seems to me to be more the latter.’

I was spellbound. Lexie’s mouth gaped.

‘And talking about cultural appropriation killing my culture is frankly a poorly phrased statement, so it’s hard to discuss it really. I mean, if you actually look at the interactions between the colonisers and the colonised - let me tell you, _way_ down the list is the flow of cultural practices from the colonisers to the colonised. And it didn’t significantly contribute to colonial domination either. Actual appropriation and colonialism are pretty much total opposites. Go to Britain today - the people doing henna _are_ Indian. I once read: “What are there more of - churches to Jesus Christ in Mexico or temples to Quetzalcoatl in Spain?”

‘Come on, Lex,’ I said as she gaped like a fish. ‘Use your common sense. They asked me to put on henna. If you can’t see a sign that that means it’s okay, I don’t know what else to tell you.’

Lexie was listening, really listening. Which, to be frank, is rare.

Ravi continued. He speaks like he’s already a professor, like he’s already got a roomful of captivated students. He loves discussing his theories and interests, and I love listening.

‘I also read about this old woman in the Philippines. She’s the last expert at this specific form of tattooing that used to be widespread. She talks about it and shows ‘outsiders’ this formerly secret, closed tradition. And that enabled it to survive and her talking about it has stimulated interest in and helped to destigmatise something that had a taboo around it for ages - which was the reason it declined in the first place.’

Lexie made one last ditch attempt.

‘Well, my friend told me about the henna thing and she’s Indian so…”

‘Ah, but I’m Indian too. So you can’t listen to one of us without ignoring the other,” Ravi smiled and winked.

Checkmate.

I read some of what Ravi recommended and I read some of his essays. I agree with him. Ravi never said it to me directly, but I know he felt Lexi’s over the top ‘defending’ of the cultures being appropriated had a lot to do with her wanting to be progressive and almost cover her… well, how should I say it. Xenophobia? Racism?

That she was really disgusted with cultural mixing on some level and she wanted to protect the culture by putting it in a cage. 

I mean, were the Vichy French protecting culture in French Indochina when they told students that the motto of ‘work, family, fatherland’ was just a new version of the ancient Confucian values (unlike the old Liberte Egalite Fraternite)? No, they were perverting it in the service of fascism and domination.

Or worse, did Vichy protect indigenous Madagascan culture from appropriation when they made them labour for the french, unpaid and forced, and said that it was a ‘traditional practice’! So if slavery is traditional, it’s okay apparently. 

And anything that isn’t traditional isn’t right. That’s just perverse.

*

We went to New York for treatment. I didn’t show them my old haunts and they didn’t ask. Instead, we went to the ballet. Mom insisted on buying me a dress.

I still don’t wear them often but she pointed to a cashmere cardigan she said would pair beautifully with the halter-top dress. I ducked into the bathroom and cried. 

The cardigan would cover my scars.

Once, I would have been pointedly offended by this. But now, I cried at the thoughtfulness, said so kindly.

What would I do without her? Who would I be? Not Isabel the rebellious daughter, Izzy the protected, loved daughter.

*

Lexie dated black men almost exclusively, ones who cared less than Brian had that Mom always told the fucking Doctor King story at every dinner.

One waited till she finished and told her his uncle was Dr King’s barber, ma’am, in that honey southern drawl. Mom gasped, delighted, and me and Dad stifled a laugh when Adam winked at Lexie. Lexie looked down and blushed, and I knew. 

They got married a year after meeting and it’s a blessing, because Mom got her first granddaughter. Adam’s family in Atlanta have the big house and cars too and Mom gets on well with Lexie’s mother of law. They gossip on the phone and conspire together to force Lexie and Adam to take a break because they both work themselves to death in the big city. 

The fact that a judge’s brother was Dr King’s barber is ludicrous but Mom doesn’t seem to have thought of that. His family are very conservative and don’t approve of things like abortion, but they love Lexie. Well, she’s blonde and beautiful and they’ll make beautiful babies and she’ll give up her job when she does. And she tones down the cultural appropriation talk at _their_ dinner table.

‘I don’t see race and they don’t either,’ she beams.

Oh, Lexie. Lexie, who routinely takes in scared young teens the night before their procedure, too scared to tell their parents what they’ve done. Who braved bullets for my right to choose.

I’ve never asked her what it was like after I ran away. We don’t talk about it.

When she has her daughter I take her to the barber run by the family of a friend of mine and they show her how to do black hair.

She messes it up and tugs at my niece’s head so hard she screams sometimes, but she’s trying.

*

We’re back home now. There’s nothing to be done. Mom wears a beautiful wig; ‘Everyone always told me I was so lucky to be blonde, but I always kind of wanted red hair.’

She has visitors every day.

She is so loved.

* 

It’s so crazy Annabel, Lexie’s daughter, was born in a whole new century, and I have so much hope for her. I plan to be the cool aunt. I want Annabel to know she can always come to me, but I have faith in Lexie too.

The kind of maternal figure Mia was to me. Except, you know, I won’t leave. I know I can’t blame her. She made the right choice for everyone that night. It wasn't really even a choice. 

But she left me. She left me. Did I leave because I wanted to leave someone too, hurt them as I had been hurt? It’s wrong to blame her but the fact of the matter is she’s not here. 

I reserve my remaining fifteen year old feelings for her, my fifteen year old hate and vitriol. I need to keep some of it, because the rest has all gone. I feel like in five more years, even the feelings I had for Mia will be gone too. It excites me and it scares me. Welcome to adulthood, Iz. 

*

After I first came back at twenty, when Moody returned a few times a year, I got annoyed at him. He was lazy, he took everything for granted. He lounged on the sofa, eyes glazed as he watched TV and slopped cereal milk over the cushions. Who will clear it up? Our cleaner? Mom? He didn’t give a fuck.

He was me, at fourteen, except he never grew up.

I found myself shouting at him when he left his bike in my path to take the trash out back. 

‘It’s stupid, Iz, why can’t you just dump it on the sidewalk like every other place in America.’

‘They have rules for a reason. If you had your way this whole town would look like a dump, just like your bedroom!’

For a moment, I sounded like my mother.

He went back to Vietnam, where he pays some poor woman who is old enough to be his mother a pittance to clean up after him. She uses his money - Mom’s money - to put her daughter through school, dreaming of a world like the one I grew up in, the one I gave up so easily.

We all make sacrifices for our kids.

I always had food on the table. I went to a great school, I had a straight run through an Ivy League, all paid for, I had cello lessons and more clothes than I knew what to do with and the latest technology. I could be anything I wanted to be, really, even an artist. Mom and Dad would help me to be the best in whatever I chose. 

They gave me the privilege to one day give my child the same childhood I had. Peace and endless, abundant prosperity.

All I had to do was wear some fucking tartan Keds. 

What a small price to pay.

*

Mom says sorry all of the time for the things she did in our childhood.

‘Remember when you banned me from wearing that skirt, you know, the one that was way too short and I wore it anyway and you banned me from Serena’s party? I wanted to kill myself,’ Lexie laughs.

Sorry.

‘Remember when you fucking lost it and threw that coffee cup at me and practically scalded half my face?’ Trip says cheekily.

Sorry.

‘I love the fish here, Mom. Remember when you dumped my pet fish down the toilet because we were going on holiday?’ Moody writes.

I’m sorry.

The apologies are unnecessary, even if they are genuine. What she did wasn't really that bad. I know, because of the amount of times she says it, casually and even off hand. 

I’ve never once apologised for burning our old house down.

Some things are too big for apologies.

*

After I burned our house down, Mom stayed in the rental with Trip and Moody. Lexie took early entry to Yale and ran there that summer. Trip got a girlfriend and spent most of his time at her house.

It was just big enough for Mom and Moody. He got quiet and withdrawn - so I am told. He wanted to be with Mom all the time. She took him to work with her like he was five years old. They got close. 

I can see it in the way she lights up when he emails, how she defends him every single time from Dad, the way Dad used to defend me (still would, if there was someone to defend me to). Moody doesn’t know what day it is mostly, on the beach, but he always calls on Mom’s birthday and buys her extravagant presents even when he barely has enough for himself.

It’s another one of those things I missed out on, when I was gone.

Dad went to a hotel. He buried himself in work as my Mom buried herself in Moody and - to be fair, to be accurate - her search for me. He had to, because both him and my mother wanted to rebuild the shell of the house in an exact replica and even with the insurance, it was pricey. He had to replace everything. Some things were priceless, and I don't mean that in the sentimental sense.

Yes, even with the insurance. They got every penny. 

They all knew it was me. Mom, Dad, Lexie, Trip, Moody. The fire investigator. the police.

The actual police were involved, not our community watch. It didn’t matter. Mom had given the police chief’s daughter an internship for experience and written her a reference to get into Vassar. Mom had given her her first job when she returned and recommended her for promotion and she had a glittering career at the Washington Post now.

It was declared an accident. There was no mention of accelerant in the report.

I was not, officially, a fugitive, but a missing, vulnerable young girl. Not a runaway. A girl who had everything to come home to. The police department never closed the investigation and ran fresh appeals every year, on the anniversary of my disappearance. In time, it became a bigger story than the fire that night, than the kidnapping, the court case.

I guess Linda and Mark wrote the department a check too.

The words ‘thank you’ are as stuck in my throat as ’sorry’.

Their daughter calls me aunt. I would burn down the world for her. Sorry.

*

When you have to survive by yourself, everything your parents did for you becomes magnified and their mistakes become smaller.

*

I’m glad they did it now, rebuilding the old house exactly. It makes what I did almost invisible. Easier to deal with.

I retreat into it, as a young woman now, good old Parkland Drive, and I am grateful. I lock the doors behind me, the comfort and safety of knowing this mansion is mine. Lexie rails against McMansions - not all people have the money for an actual mansion Lex - and she and Mark live in a sleek apartment, all glass and marble, in Brooklyn. 

People who move to Shaker don't know our home burned down. Even those who were here sometimes forget.

My crime, buried in the ashes our new - old - house stands on. Gone like it never happened. Like Mirabelle. Like pearl and Mia. Like me, once.

But I came back. And I know they could all come back, too. Ruin everything.

I find myself hoping they never come back. That I never again see the woman I wanted so desperately to be my mother. She meant a lot to me once. But we were never connected by blood, were we.

I guess I’m glad May Ling is with her mother. That thread is tied up. It can never come back to haunt anyone. I don’t believe motherly love can fix everything but I do believe we’d be lost without it.

*

Linda and Mark endow a scholarship at Harvard, his alma mater. For a woman to study there annually, a student from China, who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it. 

They call it the Mirabelle McCullough scholarship, and most people assume it’s for a daughter of theirs that died.

Maybe that’s true, in a way.

I wonder if they meet with these young women but Mom tells me they don’t.

Mark and Linda actually paid for Lexie’s first year of college. Mom was burning through her savings on PI’s looking for me and she told mr yang to save his money when he tried to pay rent as normal and returned the envelopes he slipped under the door anyway. I don’t think Dad knew. I can’t remember who told me - Trip? No, it must have been Moody. Trip was gone, that summer.

Dad was paying for the reconstruction of our home, although he found it shameful that he couldn’t provide for our family and I only found out about it from a birthday card Lex wrote for Linda.

Mom told him to sell his parents home, the one he bought them and put them in a nursing home. Dad looked at her witheringly and they didn’t talk for two months. So I’m told.

They did have to go to a nursing home eventually, though, and they were both dead when I came home.

*

When you’re a child, you think about the future. Dream about it. That’s why your parent’s life seems so staid, so boring. You imagine you can have the good parts of your life without the bad.

Or you imagine you’ll be fine without everything you have - the big TV with all the channels you want, the best quality food, the fancy art supplies.

But how would you know? You only know your life.

The actual future is nothing like what you dream about it. I see adulthood as realising this.

*

Everyone has an opinion on my mother’s treatment. I can’t stand to listen to most of them, but I can’t blame them. They just found out. Didn’t I go crazy, too, when I found out? I sat in Lexie’s car and cried so hard I burst a blood vessel in my eye.

‘Do you ever think of - of Mia?’ I ask hesitantly, one day when she is in hospital and they tell me the end is near.

‘Oh, honey,’ Mom says. ‘No, I don’t.’ 

I wonder if she is lying as she continues.

‘That’s no good for anyone.’

Mom smiles, a little, rueful. ‘We ruined each other’s lives. But we both still have our daughters. That’s all that matters, honey.’

I wonder if Mia even knew if I was missing. How would she? I know Trip and Pearl didn’t keep in contact. 

I’ll be honest, and this is vindictive. I don’t understand what Pearl saw in him.

I admit, I thought they would go to New York. I looked for them. In every passerby on the sidewalk, in every art gallery, standing in the rain staring in at the bright lights and people clinking glasses.

Trip jokes about it.

‘You don’t want to contact her, make some kind of dramatic deathbed apology?’ 

‘Trip!’ Lexie squeals.

Mom says, softly, ‘No, I don’t.’

I don’t know or really care if she is lying. I loved Mia but it was partly because she was so unlike me, so unfathomable. The kind of grown up kids think grown ups _are_ before they grow up themselves and realise adults are just kids who can make decisions about their own lives. 

She seemed mysterious and glamorous in her every word and action. I loved Mia but I didn’t know what she would do or say in response to me, unlike my mother. Now, I know even less. If we contacted her - to say what? - what would she do? Get her in the car and drive all night to be at my mother’s hospital bed?

Weep and hug my mother? Apologise? Thank her for finally revealing the truth to Pearl, even in such an awful way, for such awful reasons? Did something good of that? 

It’s been years. The scars have faded. 

Or would she say ‘okay’ and put the phone down and laugh. Would she wish her dead and tell her to go to hell? Would she tell Pearl? Would she care? 

Why should she?

I wonder what kind of relationship Pearl has with Mia, and suspect it's very like the one I have with my Mom, but not enough to care to actually find out. They were a piece of my life and now they are a piece of my past. It’s best for everyone that way, but more than that, it’s just the way it is. We lose a lot in childhood, we leave a lot behind.

So no regrets, it’s better left unreconciled. 

And this is the only life I can live.

‘Leave her in peace, kids,’ Mom says. We’re not kids but we are her kids. 

‘Leave her thinking Elena Richardson still rules over the kingdom of Shaker Heights as an evil despot.’

But she’s smiling.

And she’s not mad at Trip. She never gets mad at Trip. She has the kind of uncomplicated relationship with him she has with Moody. The kind of relationship mothers have with their sons, the kind they can never have with their daughter.

I don’t care. She doesn’t love me or Lexie or more, but we are closer. I love how she loves me.

*

I will hold my mother’s hand as she dies. Just like she held mine moments after my birth, when the world was new and inviting and there was all the promise in the world for me.

There still is, for people like me.

Moody will hold her other hand, Lexie will stroke her hair and Trip will sit by her bedside, his arm around Dad. My father will cry and I will love them so much it hurts.

I won’t apologise, because there’s nothing to forgive me for. There’s nothing but being her daughter. Of all the daughters in the world, she would choose me over them all.

When Lexie was born, she didn’t sleep for two days. She was so excited to have a daughter. She had hoped and hoped I was a girl - she chose not to find out because she thought she couldn’t bear to get through the pregnancy if she was a boy.

When I was born, all she wanted to do was sleep.

We’ve made mistakes, both of us. Mom was an adult when she made hers and I was still a child. We both had reasons for doing what we did, and does it matter?

She didn’t sleep for excitement over Lexie’s birth and she had to take sleeping pills for two months over my disappearance. 

When I was fifteen, I would have loved that, have thought it proved her love for me. When I was fifteen, I thought everything my mother had ever done for me didn’t prove her love for me sufficiently. My mother gave up much more for me than my father ever did, and I blamed her for it.

How can you quantify love? How can a mother do that? That was my mistake as a teenager. Taking her words at face value when they were only words. She was wrong to say what she did but it didn’t come from hate. Now I’m an adult, I know we all say things we don’t mean.

Saying you’re a good mother is just that too, words. It doesn’t mean anything. 

My mother said she was a good mother. But she tried, too. And if you try to be a good mother - then you are one, by the very act of trying. And the years take the sting out of her more cruel and hateful words. Her actions since then, since my birth, more than make up for them, smooth them out of existence.

I feel a kinship with Pearl, though of all of the Richardson children we’re the ones who spoke the least back then.

*

She’s my mother. I’m her daughter. I think in a book about us, those are the only six words I would want written down. But I can’t speak for Mia, or Pearl, or Linda, or Bebe, or May Ling or Mirabelle. I wonder what words they would choose.

I am an artist, still, but I do not make myself the subject of my art.

When Lexie was born, the first child she laid her eyes on, Mom didn’t sleep for two days.

When my mother dies, she looks at me and then closes her eyes.

She could have looked at any of us, and we would have felt her love, her presence, in that room the same.

We don’t speak. There’s a lot to be said about Elena Richardson. We don't have to say anything about our mother. It was said, in those years, the years we had with her.

The good and the bad. She closes her eyes and it’s all gone. Along with my mother.

*

When I was fifteen, I thought what my mother had done was unforgivable. Even at sixteen. Then I lost my baby and suddenly when I thought of my mother, there was no hate. Because I knew, if I wanted to go home, she would take me in. I could tell her what I had done and she would still love me.

How could I not do the same?

They say a mother’s love is unconditional. Maybe it is. I’m not a mother, I wouldn’t know.

It strikes me it’s the child’s love that is really unconditional. We grow up with them from our first breath, we don’t know anything else. It is ingrained in us before we can talk, before we can breath outside our mother’s womb. We belong to them. A boyfriend I had was abused terribly by his father as his mother watched. He beat our drug dealer to pieces after the dealer made an innocuous comment about his mother.

And this woman watched impassively as he was belted hard enough to leave scars on his back, years later. And he still loved her.

I don't think a mother could make a mistake big enough to be enough to stop her child’s love.

No, I don't think what Bebe Chow did was unforgivable (okay, I admit that means that what I did was not unforgivable either).

Yes, I think May Ling would forgive her. I think Mirabelle would have too.

So what if Mom doesn’t? If Linda doesn’t? If the courts didn’t?

They’re not her daughter.

Unforgivable. Like setting a fire and not even fucking checking to see if your mother was asleep in her bed. Leaving your mother to burn. I am indescribably grateful the detectors were working. It’s not like I checked them. If Dad had forgotten to buy batteries and thought I’ll get to it tomorrow…

*

Yes, in the end, my parents were right. Not about all of it. But enough.

*

Mom gives me a 24th birthday card. It’s laughable for how little effort she must have put in. It’s Star Wars themed. I’ve never seen any of them and I know for a fact she hasn’t either. But I know that actually the fact that it’s so thoughtless means something. She’d never give an acquaintance a Star Wars card with block lettering, or even close friends. They’d get the just off white, soft downy cards, with feathers and gold writing. Mom orders them from New York.

I’m family. It’s different. She went to the grocery shop recently, was at the checkout, and thought of me. Our everyday life is entwined.

**A million years ago, in a galaxy far, far away…**

The laugh is dying on my mouth when I open it and start to cry.

**… you were born.**

the card finished inside.

Mom wrote underneath, in perfect penmanship.

_and we were blessed_

_and still are_

_*_

But it was I who was blessed. 


End file.
